Heavenly Sword AU Interview : Nina Kristensen

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A post-mortem about the sequels, public reactions, God of War, and Andy Serkis' mortgage.

By Patrick Kolan

Okay, so Heavenly Sword is out now just about everywhere; Yanks have been playing it for a good while now, too - which you'd think would make an interview with Nina Kristensen, co-founder and Chief Development Ninja of Ninja Theory, irrelevant. Fools! You'd be dead wrong.

You see, we've conducted something of a post-mortem on the game, sitting down with Kristensen for a chin-wag about her thoughts on how the game was received, sequels, how they hooked Andy Serkis during a meeting over a mortgage and even the team's reaction to God of War, when it came out. Did they crap themselves? Find out below.

IGN AU: The game is totally in the bag now; considering this project has been your soul focus for the last four years, do you feel like you don't know what to do with yourself now? Has the team pulled a mass exodus for an extended holiday?

Nina Kristensen: Yeah, absolutely; it's really surreal, you know, because you spend four years of your life working in this little box and then it actually goes out and it's really exhilarating and slightly terrifying at the same time. But yeah, absolutely - everyone's on holiday at the moment, we've got people all over the world, taking really well-deserved breaks.

Nina Kristensen, co-founder and Chief Development Ninja of Ninja Theory.

IGN AU: So is there any development happening at the studio? Are you back in pre-production for anything?

Nina Kristensen: Yeah, not an awful lot going on right now; we're taking a little time out before we really dig into the next thing! [laughs]

IGN AU: Andy Serkis' involvement was a stroke of genius. Can you tell us how he originally got involved with the project? What's the full 'mortgage' story?

Nina Kristensen: Yeah! It is a great story because we honestly had been fantasising about him because he really is at the top of his game. He's the perfect, perfect guy for us and, you know, how do you get in touch with someone of that calibre without going around the houses with agents and stuff like that? All we wanted to do was get him to see it and get him to love it! And that is when fate stepped in.

Tameem Antoniades, one of the co-founders, his brother happens to be a mortgage advisor, and Andy happened to need a mortgage! [laughs] When Tameem heard about this, he begged his brother, 'please, please, please show Andy this clip!' It was actually footage out of the game and we'd done some pre-vis work on how we wanted the characters to be when we did close-ups and things like that - actually starting to get some performance in there. So, bless him, Tameem's brother agreed and halfway through the mortgage application he did spin the laptop around. Andy really liked what he saw; he was really blown away.

IGN AU: You guys didn't threaten to withhold his mortgage or anything? Heh.

Nina Kristensen: [laughs] Not to my knowledge! Not to my knowledge, as far as I know!

Andy Serkis, right, gets mo-capped. Looks like zits. Ick.

IGN AU: 'Andy, help us, or you're not getting your house - simple as that!' Is he interested in working with you on your next project?

Nina Kristensen: This was his first foray into games, he's not a gamer and he'd not considered it a dramatic medium for himself, but he has been so enthusiastic about this and really given his all to it and he's really keen to work with us again, and I'd love to work with him again. He's such a nice guy as well as being so professional.

IGN AU: Why did you eventually side with Sony after starting development on PC, then moving to Xbox 360?

Nina Kristensen: Well, you know, when we started, it was going to be a next-gen game. We hadn't decided on a publisher; we showed the game to lots of people and it did briefly make an appearance on Xbox 360, but we were talking to lots of people. In the end, one of the things that sold us on Sony was that, they said to us - well, different publishers were like, 'maybe we want a bit of this, maybe a bit of that', everyone's got their own spin on it.

Sony actually turned around to us and said, 'you know what, we want you to do exactly what you set out to do,' and that was the big sell for us. They didn't want to change it, they liked the heart of it, and they just wanted us to go with that. It was a really good match.

IGN AU: Actually, that leads into my next question nicely. Let's talk about Sixaxis. Did Sony execs put the screws to you to make sure you included motion control in the game?

Nina Kristensen: Yeah, I mean, they were certainly very keen for us to incorporate it, but actually it worked out quite well for us. You know the aftertouch controls where you can control the projectile and so forth? We already had that in the game - and it was just on the thumbstick. As soon as the Sixaxis came along, it was like, 'ooh!' and for me, personally, it makes a huge amount of sense. As a games player, I play like this [she tilts and swivels]. [laughs]